iPlot

Push to Pull

In light of the Arab Spring and the rise of India and China, and propelled by social technologies, the concept of ‘soft power’ (the phrase was coined by Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power; defined as “the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction”) is ever more relevant. Or, in marketing terms, Push is out, Pull is in. If an idea, aspiration, product, goal, ideology, culture, narrative, or national identity is attractive to its constituents, it minimizes the need for constant reinforcement and regulation – whether that is advertising, promotions, and other persuasive efforts, or bureaucracy, command-and-control, and coercion. Pull is powerful (as John Hagel illustrates in his riveting book The Power of Pull). It has a lot of Pull (pun intended) because one doesn’t have to push. It saves energy that can be invested otherwise, for example, in whatever “it” is that creates Pull. No surprise then that individuals, organizations, societies, and entire nations wish they could rely on it more.

But how does one create Pull? Even the most ardent Pull apostle will admit that Pull doesn’t just emanate from nowhere. How much hard power do you have to leverage to create soft power? How much Push is needed to generate Pull? I conducted a mini-poll on Facebook asking that exact question, and the responses ranged from “the answer to this you can only feel” to “a lot.” I sketched a diagram for myself to better understand the forces at work between this power couple, and I came up with three Push-to-Pull ratios that may help you get your “Pull-Push balance” right.

- Positive push-to-pull ratio: If you deploy more Push strategies than the Pull that they generate, then you over-invest in Push and inevitably create an undercurrent, a backlash that can even decrease the current amount of Pull you have. You risk dissolving the entropy of the overall system. Your idea, your narrative, your brand will be seen as intrusive, and in the worst case, as spam.

- Neutral push-to-pull ratio: If your Push and Pull energy levels are in balance, then you achieve the perfect equilibrium. You don’t generate any incremental Pull but you also don’t lose any. You need to be vigilant not to overdo your Push efforts, or you compromise your Pull. One could also say that the very point at which Push threatens to exceed Pull is the demarcation line between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool.’

- Negative push-to pull ratio: The last and ideal state is have Pull exceed Push. This happens after a long period of Push when the scale of Push needed to create Pull decreases. Or when the idea, aspiration, narrative, and culture is so strong that it sustains and amplifies itself. If that’s the case, your job is to simply enable connections for the “idea” (in this case, refering to brands, you can speak of “brand ideologies” or “intrinsic brands” such as IKEA, Nike, Apple, or Starbucks).

These three relationships sit along a continuum, and perhaps it makes sense to consider them to be stages in the evolution of organizations. Fledgling start-ups will rely more on Pull (for they often lack resources to invest in Push), but as they mature, they will inevitably explore means to amplify their intrinsic Pull with Push. Eventually they are so established that they can rely solely, or mainly, on Pull, however now with far bigger impact than the one they were able to achieve as start-ups. There are two critical junctures on this continuum and corresponding decisions: When exactly, in the early stage of an organizational or brand development, do you start to invest in Push? And at what point do you decrease the level of Push so you don’t “push too hard,” over-reach, and jeopardize the valuable Pull you’ve generated? (Ever come across an ad from a brand that you adore and disappointed that the company had to advertise in the first place?)

Pull is a function of cultural power, of the routines and rituals, of the energy that is flowing through an organization. Energy here translates to intensity: not only the level of activity (knowledge flows, productivity, social interactions), but also the tension between actors, the battles between conflicting ideas. If your organization experiences tension, then it is “intense.” An intense organization is always stretched, intellectually and resource-wise, and it is constantly operating at capacity of what it is able to imagine and execute on – it is in a state of emergence, a permanent crisis, with a heavy dose of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even paranoia. This is a good thing: the fearful are paralyzed, the paranoid are proactive (and creative).

Pull comes from an original idea, a compelling story, a contagious meme. Astrophysicist and philosopher David Deutsch defines a meme as "an idea that is a replicator." “A rational meme replicates because people find it valuable,” he writes in The Beginning of Infinity. “An anti-rational meme replicates by disabling its holder's rational thinking so that one has no choice but to spread it.” That’s the difference between Pull and Push, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, empowerment and enforcement, creativity and bureaucracy. Brands, countries, and movements that are built on rational memes have real Pull – and almost infinite staying power. The others will be pushed out sooner or later.

[image credit: timmonsandcompanyblog.com]

Marketing's Big Plays in 2012: The Year of the AND...

India's leading business daily newspaper, the Hindu Business Line, quoted me in a story on the new challenges that CMOs will face in 2012, based on a contribution to Jessie Paul's excellent Paul Writer marketing blog.

Here's what I wrote (and think):

“In 2012, CMOs will continue to face a fragile world economy, hyper-connectivity, growing complexity, the fragmentation of audiences, and multiple truths. This is why it will be the year of the AND: Innovation AND traditional channels. Marketing AND un-marketing. Big Data AND big intuition. ROI AND imagination. Money AND meaning. Openness AND privacy. Leadership AND leaderless movements. Iron principles AND super-flexibility. And, and, and….”

India Design Forum 2012

I am delighted to speak at the India Design Forum, which will take place in New Delhi on March 9-10, 2012, with the goal of bringing the international discourse on design to India.

The IDF will comprise of a Design Trail (March 2-10, 2012) featuring public exhibitions, workshops, and perfomances in the heart of New Delhi, as well as a two-day conference (March 9-10, 2012). The speaker line-up includes architects Rem Kohlhaas and Thomas Heatherwick, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, luxury designer Christian Louboutin, Adam Bly from Seed Media, Tom Dixon, and Karim Rashid, among many others.

The IDF founders Rajshree Pathy and Mitra Khoubrou envision the event to be an open, cross-disciplinary conversation between designers to identify the elements that define contemporary design in India. The IDF is conceived of as a platform to improve India’s access to the global design community and help it become a leader in shaping the global design agenda.

Here’s more info about the IDF: indiadesignforum.com

Embracing Openness

Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.

The Rotman issue is thus timely, and it is wise to (re-)frame the topic as “culture (and economy) of sharing,” as the foreword does:

“The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work between organizations and stakeholders are being rewritten: computation, storage and communication capacity – the basic means necessary to produce information, knowledge and culture – are now in the hands of every connected person worldwide (30 per cent of the world’s population of seven billion people.) The result: a culture of sharing powered by ubiquitous access to information that empowers stakeholders and demands radical transparency.

Unfortunately, many business leaders remain flummoxed in the face of stakeholders empowered by new tools that once seemed unimaginable: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Make no mistake, as your stakeholders become more adept at using these tools, they will demand that you become more open about your activities, and that you engage them in conversations that matter. With one billion new middle-class consumers set to enter the global economy in the next decade, the more you understand the new culture of sharing, the better off you and your organization will be.“

Amongst other contributions, the Openness issue features articles from management guru and Rotman dean Roger Martin and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, as well as interviews with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership, and Linus Torvalds, the godfather of Linux. (Full disclosure, it also includes an article I originally wrote for design mind, “Openness or How to Design for the Loss of Control”).

Only if you’re open, you can share and be shared with. And if you share, you shall receive the greatest benefit, the greatest gift of all – someone else sharing something with you: their knowledge, their networks, their passion, their ideas. It is worth noting that the TEDGlobal conference 2012 – committed to sharing “Ideas Worth Spreading” – in Edinburgh will be held under the theme Radical Openness: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open – manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity, and collaboration.”

My company, frog, is embracing Openness, too. We share our thinking with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter; more than 60% of our employees engage on Yammer in conversations that range from water-cooler topics to crowdsourced insights research firms would kill for; and design mind, the outlet you’re reading, is an open forum for all of our employees to publish their thoughts. We also recently launched SpeedMe, our own ‘speed-dating’ activity, to faciliate the bonding between new hires and ‘old frogs.’ In the words of our NY-based Associate Creative Director Dino Sanchez: “frog has grown quite a bit over the past year and with all our busy schedules it’s been difficult to keep up with new hires. Creativity is something that hinges on critique and in some cases brutal honesty, so knowing your colleagues and being comfortable with them is essential to a productive process.” Openness needs to be designed for.

At a the recent i7 Innovation Summit near Paris, frog ran a session at the beginning of the conference where we asked the conference attendees to break out into pairs and interview each other based on a questionnaire that we had prepared. Questions spanned the professional (e.g. “When was the last time you fired someone?” or “What was your biggest failure with the greatest learning?”) and the more personal (“What is your favorite movie?” – “What was your biggest lie”? etc.). The pairs had to fill in the answers in poster-size sheets which were subsequently mounted to a huge wall in the lobby, as a sort of “physical Facebook.”

David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, ran a similar exercise at WPP Stream in Athens, and in both instances the exercises were true ice-breakers for the attendees, forcing them to experience the implications of Openness first-hand: How open do I want to be? At what point does Openness become uncomfortable? What do I consider private in public? How much do I have to give in order to receive? Rowan argued that this kind of interactive, public data-mining would benefit any gathering as social interactions are typically more valuable when they’re facilitated by even a basic level of familiarity and trust among strangers. (On a related note, I’ve begun lately to ask job candidates to fill out the Proust questionnaire. Sure, professional qualifications matter the most, but at the end of the day you want to know who the person is you hire because chances are you’ll spend more time with them than with your own family.)

Yet pretending that Openness is just like any other business initiative that you can plan and execute would be disingenuous. It is a massive cultural change and requires a whole new mindset. The real challenges await the advocates of Openness after the first glitch, when things, very openly, go awry, and the conservative minds quickly come out of the closet to stigmatize one-time errors as systematic flaws. With every failure of Openness, the power of those who prefer Control rises exponentially. There is no doubt about it – openness, true, radical openness, hurts. It makes you uncomfortable, vulnerable, weak, and deprives you of the subtleties that came with control – but the benefits are huge. Pick the moments of Openness carefully: they will be your worst enemies and your best friends.

Marketer sind die Feuilletonisten der Wirtschaft

The German Werteindex blog has published an interview with me (in two parts, in German) about values-based-based leadership and how marketers can act as “chief meaning officers” to fight the disentchantment of business.

Part 1

Herr Leberecht, Sie bezeichnen ein “meaning surplus”als grundlegend für zukünftige Markenloyalität. Und während sich unser gesamtes Wirtschaftssystem im Umbruch befindet, rufen sie gerade Marketer dazu auf, diesen Prozess des Wandeln federführend zu gestalten – als Interface zwischen Kunden und Unternehmen. Was ist das Neue an der Idee von “Meaning”? Inwiefern unterscheidet sich dieses Meaning von anderen emotionalen Markenbotschaften?

Ich sehe “Meaning” als ein vorgelagertes oder weitergreifendes Konzept. Emotionale Markenbotschaften sind Instrumente zur Verbreitung von Meaning. Aber die Botschaft ist nicht die Marke. Erfolgreiche emotionale Markenbotschaften berühren den Konsumenten nur dann, wenn der Markenkern für ihn von Bedeutung (“Meaning”) ist. Die unmittelbare Erfahrung der Marke kann (und sollte,  im Idealfall) emotional sein, aber der Markenkern – die Werte, die die Marke verkörpert und der Sinn, den sie stiftet – sind eher langfristiger und übergeordneter Natur. Die beiden Ebenen sind interdependent: Emotionale Momente in der Markenerfahrung verstärken die spirituelle Grundbindung an die Marke, und die bisweilen religiöse Bindung zur Marke (siehe Apple) manifestiert und festigt sich in emotionalen Marken-Momenten.

Aber das Neue am Meaning-Konzept ist nicht der Wertekatalog der Marke. Wirtschaft ist per definitionem kein wertefreier Raum (niemand wusste dies besser als der Moralphilosoph Adam Smith, der ja bezeichnenderweise vor Wealth of Nations eine moralphilosophische Schrift mit dem Title Theory of Moral Sentiments veröffentlichte). Schon immer haben Werte die Entscheidungen von Unternehmen und Organisationen geprägt: vom nach innen gewandten Arbeitsethos – wie arbeiten wir miteinander und behandeln wir unsere Mitarbeiter? – zum nach aussen gewandten moralischen Kodex – wie gehen wir mit unseren Stakeholdern um, und welche Werte liegen unseren Produkten und Dienstleistungen zugrunde? Seitdem zahlreiche Studien aufzeigten, dass Konsumenten “moralische” Marken bevorzugen, haben Unternehmen verinnerlicht, dass die Triple-Bottom-Line-Ausrichtung einen echten Wettbewerbsvorteil darstellt (“doing well by doing good”) und durch Modelle wie CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) und zuletzt Values-Based Management Werte externalisiert und ethisches Handeln zunehmend als strategischen Erfolgsfaktor in ihr operatives Geschäft integriert. Noch einen Schritt weiter geht der stark wachsende Bereich der Social Enterpreneurship: for-profit Firmen, deren Geschäftsmodell einzig und allein auf der Schaffung sozialen Mehrwerts basiert. Schon jetzt sind 10% aller europäischen Firmen Social Enterprises (mit insgesamt 11 Millionen Angestellten), und die Europäische Union hat gerade eine neue Social Business Policy erlassen, die diesen Sektor weiter stärken wird.

Was das Chief Meaning Officer-Konzept von all diesen Paradigmen unterscheidet, ist, dass es das Unternehmen – und hier Marketing als die treibende Kraft – als den Urheber von “Bedeutung” begreift, der aktiv Moral schafft, und zwar nicht nur als Grundlage und Checkpoint für die Moralität des Geschäftsgebarens, sondern als vorrangiges, philosophisches Ziel der gesamten Unternehmung, jenseits von CSR und Social Enterpreneurship: “The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It is to make meaning”, schreibt der US-Autor und Consultant John Hagel. Meaning ist nicht auf die soziale Verantwortung eines Unternehmens begrenzt, sondern reicht weiter und meint die Produktion von Bedeutung. Diese kann sich in einer intellektuellen, emotionalen, spirituellen oder ethischen Kategorie manifestieren, oder idealerweise in allen gleichzeitig. Unternehmen sind nicht nur ein moralischer Kompass für Konsumbürger und bieten Orientierung; Meaning Officers produzieren selber Moral und stiften Sinn. Sie setzen auf intrinsische Motivation und erweitern die Maslow’sche Pyramide um Meaning – um eine transzendente Erfahrung, die über materielle Bedürfnisse und die Selbstverwirklichung hinausgeht.

Wie können Meaning Officers das bewerkstelligen?

Dies kann durch umweltfreundliches Handeln geschehen, durch das Wahrnehmen von Verantwortung in der örtlichen Kommune oder die Achtung von Menschenrechten, aber eben auch durch individuelle Sinnstiftungen abseits der großen CSR-Themen, wie z.B. die Schaffung von kleinen Ritualen. Ein bisschen ist das wie Religion for Atheists, um den Titel des jüngst erschienenen Buches des britischen Philosophen Alain de Botton zu zitieren, der eine Art Gebrauchsanleitung zur praktischen Re-Spiritualisierung  unserer säkularisierten westlichen Gesellschaft verfasst hat. Chief Meaning Officers kämpfen gegen die “Entzauberung” der Wirtschaft, gegen die Diktatur von ROI und Excel-Tabellen, und gegen Marketing als objektive Wissenschaft. Sie bringen die Kultur zurück in die Technokratie, verbreiten Ambiguität und Geheimnis in einer weitgehend prozessbestimmten, zweckorientierten Arena, und schaffen Erfahrungen von Intimität und Exklusivität in aller Öffentlichkeit.

Diese neue Art von Leadership gewinnt an Bedeutung vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Ereignisse – von Lehmann Brothers zur Euro-Krise, dem Arabischen Frühling zu Occupy Wall Street. Wir erleben den Autoritäts- und Vertrauensverlust der traditionellen Institutionen und eine fundamentale Legitimitätserosion des Kapitalismus, und beides sind letztlich moralische Krisen. Konsumenten und Bürger erwarten mehr von der Wirtschaft, aber nicht nur im Sinne von praktizierter Umwelt- und Sozialverantwortung, von “guten” Produkten und moralischer Orientierung. Es geht um die Transformation von Wirtschaft an und für sich, um die ‘raison d’etre’ von Unternehmen, um die “Moral von der Geschichte”. Und da legen es die jüngsten politisch-ökonomischen Entwicklungen nahe, ein radikaleres Umdenken zu fordern. Was ist, wenn der Sinn des Wirtschaftens in der Sinnstiftung liegt? Oder aus der Marketing-Perspektive: Machen Marken nur dann Sinn, wenn sie Sinn machen? Der amerikanische Ökonom Robert C. Solomon argumentiert in seinem Buch A Better Way to Think About Business – How Values Become Virtues, dass das Marktsystem sich nicht durch Effizienz oder Profit rechtfertigen lässt, sondern nur dadurch, dass Menschen vor allem soziale und emotionale Wesen sind. Märkte bieten ihnen einen Mechanismus, eine “sympathetic community”, wie er das nennt, zum sozialen Austausch.

Wer in diesen Communities, diesen Netzwerken, florieren will, muss eine eigene, identifizierbare Kultur pflegen und jede Menge Sozialkapital mit einbringen. Marketing – ganz im Sinne des in jeglicher Hinsicht prophetischen Cluetrain Manifestos von 2001 – ist daher immer eine kulturelle Leistung, ein Diskurs. Chief Meaning Officers sind die Feuilletonisten der Wirtschaft. Sie schaffen die Soft Power, die den langfristigen Erfolg des Unternehmens gewährleistet. Das mag sich in der Tat “soft” anhören, aber in der Network Economy, mit ihrer zunehmenden Komplexität von Beziehungsgeflechten zwischen Konsumenten, Produzenten, Konkurrenten und Partnern, sind Sozialkapital und soziale Intelligenz zu entscheidenden Erfolgskriterien geworden.

Inwiefern sind auch Werbe- und Kommunikationsagenturen gefordert, “Meaning Agencies” zu werden? Was machen Agenturen heute schon richtig? Was machen die meisten noch immer falsch?

Viele machen vieles richtig. Die Branche ist viel smarter als ihr Ruf, und vordergründige pseudo-soziale Kampagnen wie Pepsi’s Refresh Project sind eher seltene Ausrutscher. Wie Wieden + Kennedy für Nike authentische Sub-Kulturen begriffen und behauptet hat, verdient höchste Anerkennung. Toll ist auch die Dachis Group, die den Begriff des Social Business konsequent auf alle Bereiche des Unternehmens augedehnt und eine einflussreiche Plattform aufgebaut hat, die unter anderem den Social Business Index und zahlreiche wegweisende Veröffentlichungen beinhaltet. Oder die Ads Worth Spreading Kampagne von TED (“ads so good you choose to watch!”).

Werbe – und Kommunikationsagenturen sind, glaube ich, insgesamt einen Schritt voraus und haben “Meaning Production” schon lange zu ihrer Domäne gemacht. Allerdings bleiben Agenturen aufgrund ihres beschränkten Einflusses letztlich nur Impulsgeber; die Hauptverantwortung liegt bei den Inhouse Marketing Departments – und die tun sich schwer, von traditionellen Marketing-Konventionen abzurücken, weil in der Konzernzentrale oft der Mut zum innovativen “meaningful marketing” fehlt und ihnen daher das Mandat zum umfassenden Change Management versagt bleibt.

Wo sind die größten Hemmschwellen auf dem Weg zum “Chief Meaning Officer“?

Die größten Hürden für den Meaning Officer sind jedenfalls intern. Da stoßen Meaning Officer naturgemäß auf jede Menge Skepsis, und es ist nicht immer einfach, den Zynismus der eigenen Mitarbeiter, die Kluft zwischen den Glaubensbekenntnissen der Geschäftsleitung und der tatsächlichen Kultur des Unternehmens, zu überwinden. Ein Bekenntnis zum Anderssein, kreative Risikofreudigkeit, der Mut zu sozialem Marketing und der Drang zum Experimentieren sind die Charakteristika des Chief Meaning Officers. Wie Marketing-Guru Seth Godin so schön treffend formuliert: ‚Wer sich nicht der Gefahr aussetzt, wegen seiner Idee gefeuert zu werden, dessen Idee ist nicht wirklich originell.‘ Ich weiß, das ist leichter gesagt als getan, aber Marketer müssen endlich aus der Defensive heraus und selbstbewusster ihre Philosophie vertreten – und anstelle des ständigen Nachweises des Wertes von Marketing neue Werte definieren, einfordern und schaffen.

Part 2

Herr Leberecht, Sie fordern Unternehmen auf, mehr meaning zu produzieren statt neuer Produkte. Den Marketer sehen Sie als zentrales Interface zwischen Kunden und Unternehmen, der den Prozess der meaning production führt.

 Haben Marketer überhaupt ausreichend Einfluss auf die Praxis ihrer Unternehmen in Bereichen außerhalb der Marketing-Abteilung?

Die Irrelevanz-Falle ist allgegenwärtig, aber inwieweit man reintappt hängt vom Selbstverständnis des Marketers ab. Marketing wird ja oft fälschlicherweise als Cost Center gebrandmarkt, als Luxus-Funktion für gute Zeiten, dabei ist es ein kritischer Erfolgsfaktor (wir wissen von zahlreichen Studien, dass der Erfolg oder das Scheitern von Unternehmen stark vom Marketing abhängt) und im Idealfall eine der wenigen Funktionen, die eine ganzheitliche Sicht auf das Unternehmen haben. Das sollten sich Marketers zu nutze machen. Sie sollten Beziehungen aufbauen zu anderen Funktionen und auf (Marken)Kontrolle verzichten, um somit mehr Einfluss auszuüben.

Das einflussreichste Marketing ist Marketing ohne Marketing: Marketing, das sich mehr als ein Netzwerk versteht als eine Funktion. Ich sage meinem Team immer, dass wir unser Ziel nicht erreicht haben, wenn unsere Funktion unternehmensweit an Macht gewinnt, sondern wenn das ganze Unternehmen zur Marketingorganisation geworden ist und wie ein Marketer denkt und fühlt.

Was zeichnet Unternehmen aus, in denen Marketer erfolgreich ganzheitlich gestalten können?

Erfolgreiche CMOs wie Beth Comstock bei GE sind für Geschäftsfeldbestimmung, Produktentwicklung und strategische Wachstumsinitiativen verantwortlich, in enger Zusammenarbeit mit den Business Units. Wie es Comstock vorgemacht hat, sollte Marketing nahe beim Kunden sein, eine langfristige Sicht einnehmen (und sich darin deutlich von Vertrieb/Sales unterscheiden) und als ein Change Agent agieren. Dies trifft insbesondere auf den Bereich Digitale Transformation zu: Ein jüngste Studie von Cap Gemini/MIT besagt, das zwei Drittel aller globalen Konzerne mit der Transformation zum digitalen Unternehmen erhebliche Schwierigkeiten haben. Das Thema Enterprise 2.0 – also der Einzug sozialer Medien in den IT-Mainstream und die Auswirkungen sozialer Technologien im allgemeinen – bereiten Chef-Etagen erhebliche Kopfzerbrechen. Wie Business zu Social Business wird, und nicht nur im Sinne von Social Responsibility, sondern viel weitreichender, im Sinne einer kompletten Neu-Definierung von Wertschöpfung – durch Ko-Kreation mit dem Kunden, Crowdsourcing, radikale Transparenz, usw. – diesen Wandel können Marketer als Meaning Officers entscheidend mit antreiben.

Unterliegen nicht auch Werte und Sinnstiftungen der Gefahr, austauschbar zu werden? Z. B. Umweltbewusstsein ist schon längst kein USP mehr. Welche kritischen Erfolgsfaktoren gibt es ist in der Positionierung von Werten und “Meaning” zu beachten?

Meaning hat kein Verfallsdatum. Die Produktion von Bedeutung kann nicht austauschbar werden, weil sie eigentlich immer austauschbar ist. Es ist ein Template. Mit anderen Worten: Was zählt, ist die Erfahrung, der Moment des Sinnstiftens an sich, das “Unterschiedmachen”. Mit welchen Werten und Ideen das im einzelnen geschieht, sollte jedes Unternehmen für sich entscheiden. Apple steht für die Humanisierung von Technologie, IBM für die globalisierte Nutzung von Technologie im Dienste eines “Smart Planets”, Coca-Cola für Happiness und so weiter. Marken müssen ihre These finden und dann jene Argumente im kollektiven Bewusstsein verorten, die ihnen recht geben.

Aber über diese allgemeinen Markenassoziationen hinaus: Wie produziert man Bedeutung? Was macht Bedeutung aus?  Vereinfacht gesagt, sind das, denke ich, vier Komponenten: Disruption, Seltenheit, Soziabilität und Transzendenz. Disruption bedeutet die Abweichung von der Routine, die Verletzung einer „mental map“, eines standardisierten kognitiven Modells. Zum Beispiel: Das iPhone stellte die mental maps von Computer und Telefon in Frage und verband beide zu etwas Ungesehenem, einer neuen Kategorie, die eine „dritte Bedeutung“ schuf.

Sehgewohnheiten und kognitive Muster brechen – so funktioniert Werbung. Meaning braucht daher noch weitere Dimensionen. Nehmen Sie das Beispiel der deutschen Nationalmannschaft: Hört sich trivial an, aber was würde den EM-Sieg des Teams bedeutungsvoll machen? Nun, zum einen, Seltenheit. Die deutsche Elf hat schon seit 1990 keinen internationales Turnier mehr gewonnen. Meaning ist umgekehrt proportional zum Auftreten von bedeutenden Ereignissen.

Und der Seltenheitswert eines Ereignisses potenziert sich, wenn er teilbar wird, d.h. ein soziales Moment hat. Dies kann auf vier Arten geschehen: durch die Möglichkeit, an Bedeutung teilzuhaben und sie aktiv mitzugestalten; durch das Teilen einer bedeutenden Erfahrung mit anderen (Bedeutung entsteht immer im Austausch mit anderen, ist ein soziales Phänomen – siehe „Fanmeile“); durch Großzügigkeit (wenn man mehr gibt als nimmt, entsteht ein Bedeutungsexzess, ein “meaning surplus”); und durch den sozialen Mehrwert, den Beitrag zur Gesellschaft, zum allgemeinen Wohl oder dem von benachteiligten sozialen Gruppierungen.

Letzteres führt zum Kriterium der Transzendenz: Es kann ein gesellschaftliches Ziel sein, das das individuelle Ereignis überhöht, eine Ideologie, oder eine abstrakte, universale Wahrheit. Bedeutende Erlebnisse deuten immer auf eine übergreifende Vision, eine „dritte Bedeutung” hin. Sie stehen nie nur für sich selbst. Warum wird eine Fussball-WM zum “Sommermärchen” und ein Team zum „Weltmeister der Herzen“? Das ist ja kein reiner PR-Spin, sondern eine echte emotionale Bewegung. Das konnte man auch bei Steve Jobs Tod sehen, als die kollektive Trauer fast schon ekstatische Züge annahm, oder in Obamas vieldiskutierter Präsidentschaftskampagne von 2008, in der sich Hunderttausende von jungen Amerikanern engagierten, weil sie von der Vision von “Hope” – von der Machbarkeit echten Wandels – inspiriert waren. Oder zuletzt Occupy Wall Street. Es gibt einfach diese Momente, die eine tiefe innere Wahrheit in uns bloßlegen.

Chief Meaning Officers behalten alle diese Faktoren – Disruption, Seltenheit, Soziabilität und Transzendenz – bei ihren Aktivitäten immer im Auge. Aber ein fünfter fehlt noch: Echtheit. Nur wenn die Intentionen des Unternehmens ehrlich sind, wird die Authentizität der Marke fühlbar. Ansonsten ist Meaning bedeutungslos.

Wie passt die Entwicklung zu mehr Meaning zur ansonsten ebenso immer öfter hörbaren Forderung nach mehr Meßbarkeit und effektiven ROI?

Zunächst einmal: Ich schenke der geläufigen Formel, dass man nur das managen kann, was man messen kann, keinen Glauben. Im Gegenteil: Die besten Manager sind Experten im Managen des Nicht-Messbaren. Um es noch etwas mehr zuzuspitzen: ROI ist eine Schimäre und in der Regel ein Alibi, um Chefs zufriedenzustellen. Wer keine Ideen und keine Vision hat, der hat eben Zahlen. Verstehen Sie mich nicht falsch, ich bin nicht grundsätzlich gegen die Quantifizierung der Wirkung von Marketing-Programmen. Aber nur, wenn man im Hinterkopf behält, dass diese Zahlen immer nur eine Annäherung dastellen, eine Interpretation, aber niemals eine objektive Wahrheit. Der ROI bleibt zwangsläufig oft “intangible” (Anm. d. Red.: immateriell). Wobei selbst der Sprachgebrauch zweifelhaft ist. Dass die vermeintlichen “tangible assets” (Anm. d. Red.: materielle Vermögenswerte) unter Umständen wesentlich volatiler sind als die “intangibles” hat die jüngste Finanzkrise ja nachdrücklich bewiesen. (Sie hat uns auch daran erinnert, dass ein Grossteil der Buchhaltungswerte eines Unternehmens sich als vollkommen virtuell herausstellen kann.)

Das schöne deutsche Wort der “Wertschätzung” wird immer noch unterschätzt im Vergleich zu den sogenannten “harten” Metrics wie Leads, Funnel Contribution oder Revenue Contribution. Goodwill, Reputation, Customer Lifetime Value (der Wert eines einzelnen Kunden über den gesamten Zeitraum der Kundenbeziehung), soziales Kapital oder “organizational capital” (wie es der US-Finanztheoretiker Baruch Lev nennt) – diese Werte sind meiner Meinung nach wesentlich aussagekräftiger, wenn auch ebenso schwer präzise zu messen.

Hinzu kommt, dass die meisten ROI Messungen meist kurzfristig gedacht und allein auf das Quartalsergebnis oder die unmittelbare Wirkung von Marketingaktivitäten bezogen sind. Aber das Quartal (und wie überhaupt der gesamte übliche Budgetrahmen von einem Jahr) sind recht willkürliche Planungseinheiten, die nur selten mit der Realität eines Unternehmens übereinstimmen. Der Markt steht niemals still, Kunden denken und handeln in unterschiedlichen zeitlichen Perspektiven, und die Investition in Marken, in die Beziehung zu Kunden, in intellektuelle und emotionale Erfahrungen, lässt sich nur schwer formal erfassen. Jeder Marketer, der erklärt, genau zu wissen, mit welchem Effekt er wo investiert, lügt. Der ROI von Marketing ist letztlich immer eine Scheinkalkulation.

Und dennoch machen die meisten Marketingleute das Spiel mit – weil sie durch die Machtkonventionen in ihren Unternehmen dazu gezwungen werden und glauben, sonst ihr Mitspracherecht bei strategischen Entscheidungen zu verlieren. Wer Zahlen hat, gewinnt.

Ich bin mir sicher, dass viele Marketingabteilungen 50% ihrer Zeit damit verbringen, ihre Programme zu evaluieren und ROI Reports für das Management-Team zu erstellen. Stellen Sie sich vor, wie viel mehr sie erreichen würden, wenn sie auch nur die Hälfte dieser Zeit nicht für Reporting, sondern für kreative Marketing-Aktivitäten aufbrächten! Wie viel mehr Bedeutung könnten sie produzieren, wie viel neue Kunden könnten sie schaffen und wie viele existierende Kundenbeziehungen stärken? Ich kenne viele Kollegen, die gezwungen werden, detaillierte ROI Analysen zu erstellen, bevor sie überhaupt Geld ausgeben können – aber dann ist es meistens schon zu spät. Im Zeitalter des Social Web hat das Marketing keine Zeit mehr für ausgiebige Planung – alles was passiert, passiert jetzt. Just do it! Der Marketing-Mix ändert sich jeden Tag. Das einzig konstante sind Experimente – und die Werte, die sich in langfristigen Beziehungen zu Kunden und Öffentlichkeit ausdrücken.

Ein letzter Gedanke noch: Trotz des ganzen Hypes um Big Data und die totale, Echtzeit-nahe Erfassung und Analyse von Kundendaten, sollte man nicht vergessen, dass Daten immer nur reaktives Verhalten ermöglichen; selbst die datenbasierte Zukunftsplanung ist eine Reaktion. Statt auf Big Data setze ich auf Big Intuition! Wer wirklich innovativ sein will und etwas verändern will, vertraut seiner Intuition. Die ist nämlich schneller als alle Daten. Paradoxerweise gilt in der Wissensgesellschaft: Intuition sticht Wissen aus. Chief Meaning Officers wissen das. Sie erahnen Trends, bevor diese messbar werden, vertrauen ihrem (Mit)Gefühl und machen somit den Unterschied aus, der dann in ein echtes Differenzierungsmerkmal mündet. Wer nur Daten analysiert, ahmt das Bestehende nach. Wer selbstbewusst genug ist, um Daten zu ignorieren, kann Verhalten beeinflussen und tatsächlich etwas Neues schaffen. Henry Ford hatte Recht: ‚Wenn ich auf meine Kunden gehört hätte, hätte ich schnellere Pferde produziert‘. Daten helfen uns zu verstehen, wie die Welt ist; Innovatoren und Visionäre aber (und Chief Meaning Officers sind beides!) sehen die Welt, wie sie nicht ist.

 

Bridging the Values Gap

[This post also appeeared on the Forumblog of the World Economic Forum]

The current economic crisis presents an opportunity to realign our collective moral compass. First, by understanding the values that underlie our economies. Second, by reconciling the agendas of business with the true needs of individuals.

Clearly, the bond between society and business is broken, and the legitimacy of companies is at a new low point. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street express a growing indignation over the disconnect between the perks for a few and the rights of many. When Harvard undergraduate students stage a walkout of an Economics 101 class in sympathy with the Occupy movement to protest the ‘corporatization’ of education, it might indeed indicate the beginning of a “New Progressive Movement.” It is not just the redistribution of wealth that’s being scrutinized, however. What citizens, in the U.S. and elsewhere, demand are new, more collaborative and inclusive models of value creation that produce meaning as much as profits.

Many leading business thinkers, from Gary Hamel to Michael Porter are listening to this groundswell. Beyond conventional concepts of corporate social responsibility, the discourse has shifted to more fundamental questions that prompt us to rethink the very gestalt of the enterprise. Hamel proclaims the “reinvention of management” to make our organizations more human-oriented, Porter promotes the concept of “Shared Value,” and Umair Haque heralds the “Meaning Organization.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in a signature piece for a special issue of the Harvard Business Review on the ‘Good Company,’ makes the case for the enterprise as a “social institution” that thrives on a shared social purpose, a long-term view, emotional engagement of all stakeholders, community-building, innovation, and self-organization. In a similar vein, but at the macro-level, the economist Robert C. Solomon, in his book A Better Way to Think About Business – How Values Become Virtues, asserts that “Market systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits, but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.”

And yet, the reality in many companies today is that there appears to be a gap between the articulation of lofty principles and their application, despite all the talk about purpose, social power, emotional engagement, and community-building. A 2010 survey by Deloitte showed that nearly half of the workers polled who plan to seek out a new job say they have been motivated by a loss of trust in their employer. Startlingly, 46 percent of those surveyed reported a lack of transparency in their current company’s internal communications. Forty percent said they have been treated unethically by their employer.

It is important to understand the Values Gap, which manifests itself in several ways: First of all, the high-level frameworks designed to support shared values at the corporate level (e.g. the Codes of Conduct crafted by most Fortune 500 companies) often fall short of being meaningful at the individual level. A recent study conducted by the Boston Research Group, surveying thousands of U.S. professionals across industries and hierarchy levels, found that 43% of them described their company culture as “based on command-and-control, top-down management, or leadership by coercion,” and 54% as top-down, but with “skilled leadership, lots of rules, and a mix of carrots and sticks.” Only a modest 3% believed their firm to have a culture of “self-governance,” in which everyone is guided by a “set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company’s mission.”

But even if employees genuinely buy into the values of their company, self-governance remains challenging, since well-articulated and generally supported principles—from transparency to corporate social responsibility—are hard to translate into day-to-day individual decision-making. The ‘netizens,’ or the digital generation of Millenials, in particular, are keen on doing ‘good business,’ but may be at odds with their managers, making it harder to practice universal moral principles in the workplace. A 2010 IBM study, for instance, found that young people born after 1980 found were 35 percent more likely than CEOs to include sustainability in their lists of top three leadership qualities.

The good news is that the pervasiveness of social networks and micro-blogs, ubiquitous computing, and smart devices present a new opportunity to drive adoption of values-centered management. The transparency and reciprocity inherent in these social technologies have created new, innovative models of ‘prosumption’ (the consumer as producer) that can not only engage business professionals in a dialogue on values but also provide them with practical tools to make more values-based decisions every day. These tools can be software apps and services that take advantage of network effects, instant feedback, and peer pressure, as well as insights from behavioral economics and gaming to design compelling interactions and user experiences.

Think of a mobile app that uses real-time peer feedback from social networks to help business professionals resolve ethical dilemmas; an online portal serving as a repository of case studies tailored to users’ respective business context; a web-based Happiness Index that measures the happiness and well-being of employees on a regular basis; a data visualization tool that illustrates the unintended consequences or the externalities of decisions at a global level; an augmented reality app that maps out and archives decision-making paths; a web service that personalizes a company’s Code of Conduct, etc. If we can make the moral economy tangible for users, we can make it real.

Lastly, the most acute and possibly widening gap is between individuals and governmental institutions. People—and not only young people who grew up online—are adapting quickly to social technologies; think of Facebook’s population, at more than 800 million to date, nearly triple that of the U.S. and rapidly approaching those of India or China. In a hyper-connected, trans-national world, people move faster than institutions, as we have witnessed in the Arab Spring and experience on the Social Web every day. Social power evolves into movements long before institutions decide where they want to move, and in the lack of action, activism is born.

The new social movements may be leaderless and have multiple and even conflicting agendas (see Occupy Wall Street) but it doesn’t matter when the platform is the medium and social technology-enabled collective action, bottom-up, is driving radical, immediate change that can be aligned with a more succinct purpose later. The point at which agency becomes more important than agenda is the very point at which social power becomes stronger than institutional authority. This is a true leveling of the playing-field. As economist Bernard Lietaer pointed out in a recent talk at the Poptech conference: “In the information age, every country is developing. There are some who realize that and some who don’t.”

Those who do, trust the power of social technologies, the principles of self-governance, and the passions of entrepreneurs and other change-makers to restore trust in business and create the social capital we need for a new social covenant. Only if we move from a merely transactional to an interactional concept of business, will our economies produce the morale we need to live in connected, happy, and sustainable societies, and the Values Gap will come closer to closing.

[image credit: Adbusters]

The Smartest Brands Embrace Paradox

Delighted that Wired Uk ran my article below in their November issue:

The Connected Age has arrived. A world connected through ubiquitous, real-time and social computing, with soon close to 100 billion devices on the Internet of Things. Products and services are increasingly multifunctional, multilayered and linked to ecosystems of surrounding products, applications and services. Everything is getting smarter by becoming highly connected and instantly adaptable. What does this mean for branding, which has traditionally sought to create a carefully crafted, durable image? How can brands become more connected and flexible? What are the attributes of a smart brand?

To answer that requires debunking some of marketing's most cherished beliefs. First: the need for a tightly controlled overarching strategy. It is fine to have a strategy, as long as you can modify it -- even give it up. The smart brand develops superflexible strategies. Changing its marketing mix every day, it operates like a modern software organisation that has replaced linear, static planning with agile, decentralised methods that can be readily upgraded. Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses in-store customer feedback to adapt instantly its line of clothes.

The smart brand is open and adept at managing the loss of control. Instead of trying to do everything in-house, it works with others (including other brands), identifying and activating connections that are mutually valuable. Case in point: Lady Gaga, who straddles multiple industries (fashion, tech, music), partnered with other connectors such as Google, Facebook, Zynga and Starbucks for her latest album release. Or take conference network TED, which open-sourced its exclusive brand by launching the TEDx franchise. The more control it gave up, the more influence it gained. The value of a smart brand is not measured by how much uncertainty it can eliminate, but how much uncertainty it can tolerate.

This challenges the second cornerstone of marketers: consistency. Marketers assert that consumer trust is earned by predictable behaviour. But they are confusing substance with form. Yes, brands need principles -- but rather than always exhibiting the same look and feel, the smart brand looks and feels different all the time, while staying true to its underlying values. The smart brand is skilled at detecting behavioural cues. It can identify and easily join conversations, and, through its behaviour, recognise, activate and move networks. The smart brand is multipolar, with several centres of gravity. Guerrilla-like, it stays unpredictable and intersperses its public persona with seemingly random acts that make it human: Interflora, for instance, monitored Twitter to identify users who needed cheering up and then sent them a surprise bouquet of flowers.

The third big marketing myth is that data leads to knowledge, which leads to power. Paradoxically, the Connected Age pits Big Intuition against Big Data. With markets as conversations and social media as the über-conversation, the smart brand pursues what Sherry Turkle calls "distributed presence": using a multichannel, always-on strategy to be in the right place at the right time. In the connected world, with its rapidly growing complexity, power comes from knowledge that is situational.

The smart brand remains ephemeral because it understands that, despite the deluge of aggregated and personal data at its disposal, it is more about sensing than hard knowledge, more art than science. Hyper-connected, hyper-social, distributed and omnipresent, the smart brand anticipates desires, senses mood shifts, preempts knowledge, and quickly directs attention to significant market events and conversations -- because whenever something happens or is being talked about, the smart brand is already there.

The Opposite House

Otherness and other pillars of a new moral economy

“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.

You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.

It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.

Having just worked through the intricacies of integrating a marketing function and harmonizing two brands (and very different business cultures), I know how exhausting it can be when there is always ‘the other side of the story.’ This ‘other side’ can be the externalization of effects (responsibility), or it can mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (empathy). What the other side rarely appreciates is how hard you have worked to be on yours, and how much effort it has been for you to truly believe in it. Whatever it takes then to make you switch sides (or at least recognize the opposite one), it must include some kind of reimbursement for the intellectual and emotional work that went into asserting and upholding your one truth. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence – the path there, the ‘empathy dividend,’ better be worthwhile. This is true for conflict management at the individual, institutional, societal, and international level: Israel and the Arab world, Shiites and Sunni, Pakistan and India, China and the US, North and South Korea, Occupy Wall Street versus the 1%, and the list goes on – the world is conveniently framed by antagonisms, by dualities that stubbornly resist both reconciliation and the parallel truths that Fitzgerald heralded.

China resolves dualities by grasping Yin and Yang as complementary, interconnected forces, and its defiance of dichotomous moral judgments is not always easy to accept for the Western mind. Henry Kissinger’s views On China are a notable exception to the many books (e.g. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and James Kynge’s China Shakes the World) that have recently examined how an ascendant and increasingly confident China could affect the rest of us. Kissinger seeks to understand China’s place in the world from the conditions of China’s complicated history and rich culture, not through the lens of Western morale. Kissinger does not portray China as hegemonial power but as an introverted nation that aims at protecting its ideal of a ‘harmonious society’ by making calculated offensive moves. He compares them to the Chinese board game Weiqi where the onus is on strategic encirclement rather than the black and white of absolute victory or defeat. Morality, essentially, deals with the question of how we treat the Other – the one who is not identical with us. Empathy, or even sympathy, is its foundation. With respect to China, this raises the question: To what extent can you leave your comfort zone, your moral center of gravity, to understand the Other before your absolute truth becomes relative, your ethical behavior situational, and your moral compass rudderless?

Moreover, a concept of morality based on Otherness presumes the Cartesian continuum of Ego and Self. But what if the line between Self and Other is fuzzy? In his writings, the British moral philosopher Derek Parfit (who became famous through his teleporter thought experiment and was recently portrayed in this stunning New Yorker article) rejects the integrity of personal identity and instead proposes a reductionist view of human life that renders the Kantian concept of the Self’s moral autonomy obsolete. If parts of your brain cells were to be transplanted into another body, he wonders, what would that do to yours and the other body’s personal identity? Who would be you? Parfit claims there would be two Selves (or none). Consequently, morality, in his view, is meta-personal and non-relational, and can only be derived from universal truths. To him, the loss of the concept of a separate Self is liberating, which puts him him in close proximity to Buddhists, who identify and recognize themselves in the Other:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... [However] When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.” [Derek Parfit]

Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values covers reductionist terrain as well, albeit from a very different vantage point. Harris seeks to constitute moral relevance from the alleged objectivity of scientific findings. But do we really want to entrust science all of our moral decisions? Science is not an authority on morality; it is its very subject. The moral landscape is not as flat as Harris wants us to believe. Or to riff on William Gibson: “Morality is here, it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Steven Pinker, in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that the spread of literacy led to a “circle of empathy,” propelled by many rights movements of 20th century that brandished immoral behavior as anti-social and by doing so accomplished to largely ban it from Western societies. If you look at the Occupy Wall Street movement – as nascent as it may appear – one wonders if we may see a similar social norm-shifting phenomenon emerge in the corporate world. Writer and Techonomy conference curator David Kirkpatrick wrote a poignant piece on how the new social power we witnessed in the Arab Spring may lead to a corporate revolution, and indeed one may wonder: Will the American Fall usher in the demise of the corporation as we know it?

Trade is an arbiter of peace, as Pinker argues. Collaboration and inclusion produce morale, an effect that is amplified by the tremendous amount of social capital generated by social media and in particular through the principle of reciprocity at work on social networking sites. Facebook, through this lens, can be viewed as the biggest morale producer of our times, not in the sense of giving to charities or supporting causes one click at a time – the so-often-derided ‘clicktivism’ – but through rich interactions and an appreciation and experience of Otherness that is made possible through the voyeurism emanating from the transparency of individual behaviors at public display.

On the other hand, hyper-connectivity may yield the opposite effect: When everything and everyone is connected all the time, will the individual moral Self be neutralized by a seamless collective that absorbs Otherness into Sameness? In this vein, Eli Pariser argues that the Social Web is a self-selecting Filter Bubble, and that rather than experiencing the Other, we’re just experiencing an increasingly narrow projection of ourselves, so that our social graph, based on our web history of purchases, clicks, friends, and likes, will ultimately become congruent with the social universe of One. Then our lives and the lives of others will be identical, and even with our identity spread beyond our Selves, it will not occur in the way Parfit envisioned it.

This debate on the Other is the main debate we ought to have in light of the crisis of our economies. A ‘moral economy’ puts the Other at the center of all its activities, and if it truly does, it will no longer need the qualifier ‘moral.’ However, our largely secularized and rationalized economy is struggling to restore its moral and spiritual acumen (see Umair Haque’s musings on The Meaning Organization and my own piece on the Chief Meaning Officer), and simply borrowing best practices from religion as proposed by Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0” (see a good rebuttal here) won’t suffice when what we are really lacking is not a practical “god-free” tool kit but an idealistic and spiritual vision, a social contract that is meaningful at the personal level. Economist Robert C. Solomon described it aptly: “Markets systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.” Consequently, Brad McLane, in a recent Huffington Post article, makes the case for the role of a “Chief Community Officer,” a leader who can reconcile individual interests with the satisfaction of trusted cooperation (research has shown that trust and trustworthiness produce oxytocin, the “hormone of love”).

Embracing Otherness has been the foundation for business since its inception – business serves the Other, as in the customer, or the stakeholders of today and tomorrow (future generations), but it has gained new relevance. Another, perhaps more important side to it is innovation. Otherness is the very source of innovation. The deviation from the normal, the conventional, and the routine is how new and different ideas are born – ideas that change the world for the better, which at the end of the day is the entrepreneur’s fundamental moral obligation. This is the legacy of Steve Jobs and other “fools” who “saw the world as it is not” – and changed it.

The new moral leadership starts with business school education. Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana therefore asks for a “reprofessionalization of the manager,” so that he can overcome the self-interest-driven homo economicus, the self-inflicted Machiavellian mechanisms of competition and short-term gain, and instead focus again on his true task – to build and nurture long-term cooperative relationships that allow an economy, a plurality of interactions and transactions between trusted and trusting Others guided by shared values, to thrive.

Back to the initial question: what justifies my existence? As a marketer, it is my responsibility to understand the Others and connect them through many parallel truths – even if it’s just for a moment, a flickering desire, a shared passion and experience, or a common purpose. I am an engineer of trust, and I enjoy communicating for the very act of communicating. I can create and cultivate “sympathetic communities” that rely on “woven interactions” rather than “vector communications.” In the best case, I can help build a house of opposites on the basis of the social capital and goodwill generated by meaningful brands that serve as moral stewards, embrace paradox, and balance the dialectic forces of competition and cooperation, codified behavior and open-ended innovation. I am not here to generate impressions; I am here to reward attention with lasting value.

(c) picture by Coolhunting

Fake Christo?

Does faking the fake make it real? [Hong Kong, September 17, 2011]

Discussing New Marketing Strategies with NDTV Profit and The Hindu Business Line in India

NDTV Profit, India's leading business news channel, interviewed me on the sideline of the recent Futurist CMO conference in Gurgaon. In the interview, which aired several times on national TV, I try to explain why in an increasingly hyper-connected world marketers should break the common rules of "strategy, consistency, control, and data” (see my presentation). India's leading business daily newspaper, The Hindu Business Line, also quoted me in an article on marketing in the digital age.

NDTV interview

The Hindu Business Line

Branding for the Connected World

I was privilleged to lead the recent strategic re-positioning and re- branding of my employer, the Aricent Group, introducing the company as a provider of “innovation services for the connected world.” The Aricent Group name now serves as the new corporate brand for the company, with product innovation, design, and related engineering offerings marketed under the frog brand, and R&D engineering and carrier services marketed under the Aricent brand. The brands will each maintain their own client base and continue to collaborate in situations where clients can benefit from the Aricent Group's full breadth of capabilities.

The new brand positioning is reflected in our revised visual identity and web site (www.aricent.com). The identity was created in collaboration with acclaimed strategic branding firm Siegel+Gale, which has worked with global brands including 3M, American Express, and The Four Seasons.

The new branding has been received very well by clients, analysts, and media. Here’s some recent coverage that examines some of the business and design considerations that went into the new branding.

Hindu Business Line: “Branding for a Connected World”

Under Consideration: “Aricent’s Quiet Swoosh”

For more details, see this case study by Siegel+Gale.

Futurist CMO Conference: Unpredictability is the New Consistency

 

A lot has been written lately about the changing profile of the CMO, a role which faces an increasingly complex set of stakeholders and expectations (“10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs”) as it is engulfed by empowered consumers, big data, digital media pervasion, and accelerated technology innovation cycles. While CMO tenures have slightly increased to an average of less than four years, the role remains a hot seat. Technology savvy, analytics prowess, and strict ROI measurement are almost unanimously heralded as the key attributes of a successful marketing leader. The CMO is expected to be a business strategist, innovator, and change agent, while at the same time also acting as the brand evangelist, inspirational communicator-in-chief, and cross-functional collaborator. Tough one. How can today’s CMO succeed in times of hyper-connectivity when long-held beliefs are shattered, audiences are transient, and “software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen)?

The Futurist CMO conference, hosted by former Wipro CMO Jessie Paul and her indefatigable team in the high-tech cluster of Gurgaon, near Delhi, last week, discussed this very question. Paul Writer, the name of Jessie’s venture, is devoted to fostering the Indian marketing community, and provides online and offline forums for a lively exchange on emerging marketing trends. Their newsletter is a fantastic resource for marketing professionals worldwide, and the equally sophisticated conference gathered some of India’s brightest marketing minds (from brands such as Coffee Day, Citibank, Essar, Reliance, Godfrey Phillips, NIIT, Aircel, Makemytrip.com, IBM, and Capital Foods) for an exhilarating two days of thought-provoking presentations and panels.

In my presentation in Gurgaon, I took a slightly contrarian view, outlining the idea of Smart Brands to debunk the four big marketing myths of strategy, control, consistency and data. I proposed a super-flexible portfolio of readily adaptable initiatives instead of a single-strategy approach, argued for understanding marketing as a state of permanent crisis only to be tackled with a deliberate design for the loss of control; made the case for unpredictability as the new consistency, and contrasted Big Data with Big Intuition. My talk spurred an animated debate. One attendee objected: “If we follow your advice, we will never have a seat at the table.” But which table do you want to have a seat at, and at whose mercy? Our expertise runs broad not deep, and by the nature of our role we are comfortable with ambiguity and paradox, can make sense of disparate information, and turn data into meanignful stories. We are the "air traffic controllers" of the connected age, as Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy aptly put it. It’s time for us marketers to determine our own fortune and capitalize on our unique strengths: insight, intuition, and imagination.

Here's my deck on Slideshare: 

For a comprehensive write-up of the conference, check out this blog post by my colleague Mitali Darbari Prakash.

Photos from the conference (by Naina)

Press: 'More than 60 Percent of Google Searches Are From Rural Areas'

Image credits: AP (above), Naina (CMO conference)

Adapt, Jugaad, Hacking, Shanzhai or the Merits of Seeing the World As It Is Not

I’m usually skeptical when local habits become emerging trends and are subsequently declared a new global management paradigm, but in the case of the much buzzed-about Jugaad I am inclined to follow the gurus.The trend began with Reena Jana’s seminal article in BusinessWeek in December 2009, in which she critically investigated the value of Jugaad and anticipated its entering the lexicon of management consultants. The term Jugaad (pronounced “joo-gaardh”) is a colloquial Hindi word that describes a creative ad hoc solution to a vexing issue, making existing things work and/or creating new things with scarce resources. Although sometimes used pejoratively (in the sense of a makeshift cheap fix), it is now widely accepted as a noun to describe Indian-style innovation (some also call it “indovation”) – describing the inventiveness of Indian grassroots engineers and scientists that have led to the pedal-powered washing machine, inspired the extra-low-cost Tata Nano car, or the success of India’s space program. It is, in short, the art of holistic (and therefore lateral) thinking, of unbound, resilient creativity, and of improvisation and rapid prototyping under severe constraints.

This sounds strangely like Design Thinking – the last “out-of-the-box” management fad that never really reached the C-suites and eventually remained an insular theory (cynics remark that it allowed wannabe designers to at least think like designers, and they consider the ongoing debate about whether or not design thinking is dead simply a post-mortem obsession). Design Thinking was marketed as a methodology, a template for driving systemic change across industries and societal areas through silver design bullets, but despite its kernel of truth and undoubted appeal, it ultimately failed to have more than just shallow impact. I can’t tell you how many executives I have come across at conferences who proudly share that they are now “of course applying a little bit of design thinking in their company” (the “of course” is the worst).

While companies that exhibit curiosity and open-mindedness deserve praise, many of them are suckers for the next new shiny thing that promises to give them an innovation edge. Granted, companies are inherently paranoid, and perhaps that’s the only way for them to survive, but it is remarkable how insecure they are when it comes to innovation, and it seems as if their insecurity is directly proportional to their size. Picasso’s famous line “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain artists as we grow up” could not be truer for organizations – they appear to be spending their entire adulthood regaining the naïve creative poise they had when they were small, young, and innocent. The more they expand their horizons, the more they shrink the sky.

On the other side of the spectrum, start-ups ‘just do it,’ they use trial and error, passion, and a fervent can-do attitude to churn out ideas and “make stuff.” However, as soon as they mature into more formal organizational designs and operations, they usually begin to hire consultants who tell them how to do and label what they had been doing and known all along. These consultants then replace intuition with frameworks and routines with methodologies, and they impose processes on organisms, analyze the obvious, and worship “strategy” – as if such thing existed in the messy world of creativity.

Most of these consultants are trying to sell innovation as a toolbox, but as former BusinessWeek writer Helen Walters aptly points out: Innovation cannot be reduced to a process. “A codified, repeatable, reusable practice contradicts the nature of innovation, which requires difficult, uncomfortable work to challenge the status quo of an industry or, at the very least, an organization,” she writes, and suggests that: “Executives are understandably looking for tidy ways to guarantee their innovation efforts – but they'd be better off coming to terms with the fact that there aren’t any.”

With this insight becoming the new norm, it is no surprise that innovation gurus are now shifting their focus to innovation as a mindset. Clayton Christensen, who famously coined the term “Disruptive Innovation,” has been investigating the "Innovator’s DNA" over the past few years and published the results in his new book (together with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen). He identifies as the five core skills of the innovator: questioning, observing, networking, experimenting, and associational thinking.

Dev Patnaik, CEO and founder of Jump Associates, heralds the term Hybrid Thinking, proposing multi-disciplinary teams of multi-disciplinary people (“folks who are one-part humanist, one-part technologist, and one-part capitalist”). Adept at dealing with ambiguity, hybrid thinkers are T-shaped renaissance men and women who can quickly distill what matters from various fields – the innovator as the big synthesizer.

This kind of nimbleness is also touted by Financial Times columnist and recent TEDGlobal speaker Tim Harford. In his new book Adapt he contends that “success always starts with failure.” Today’s world challenges, he argues, simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions; the world has become far too unpredictable and complex. Leaning on the Darwinian principles of evolution, Harford believes that disruptive innovations bubble up in the marketplace by a process of trial and error and that ingenuity rather than strategic genius or commercial acumen defines the most brilliant innovations. Consequently, innovators must adapt – experiment feverishly, improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward.

And from there it’s only a baby step to Jugaad. Navi Radjou, one of the foremost experts on global innovation, with whom I had the pleasure to meet last week, believes Jugaad is a model that leaders across industries and cultures can adopt, not in the sense of frugal or reverse innovation that sees Western companies develop and pilot products in emerging markets to then import them back home or globalize them, but as the fundamental, polycentric, and improvisational mindset of innovators.

In a certain sense, Jugaad is a remote sibling of the Western-style hacking, the manipulation of existing products and services, and with the Chinese Shanzhai phenomenon (innovation through fast imitation) it has in common the utter disrespect for any kind of brand or management ideology. Adaptation, improvisation, rapid experimentation, fast failing, a high tolerance for ambiguity, super-flexibility (one of the key traits of what I call “smart brands”) – together these principles are perhaps marking the beginning of a new era of doing business, a new economy.

In light of the demise of same-old capitalism, bizarre piles of national debt, the concern about a “jobless future,” and growing social tensions from Greece to Israel to China, this new economy has become a mission-critical project for humanity. It is no coincidence that several recent publications reference betterment (in other words, innovation) as a variable of culture, using different terms, yet describing the same values and behaviors. Philosophically-minded author and “wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz provides a meta-perspective on them all in her book Being Wrong. She observes that “seeing the world as it is not” (the definition of being wrong) is the quintessence of imagination, invention, and hope – and of course innovation. Innovators see the world as it is not (but could be). They are always initially wrong to be ultimately right. It’s the fools who speak the truth, have “insane” ideas, and ultimately make change happen. We need more of them in times like these.

design mind - The Connective Issue

 
 

frog (formerly frog design), my company, just released the latest edition of its award-winning design mind magazine in a new, large broadsheet format. The seventh print issue of design mind (and its fourteenth overall) - "The Connective Issue" - investigates the theme of connectivity. With more devices tapped into the Internet than there are people on Earth, we are now more connected than ever. In more than 18 original articles, poster-sized infographics, and interviews with technology and cultural luminaries, The Connective Issue of design mind explores all the ways we come together: from a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook, the world's most popular social network executes its design strategies to successfully connect almost one billion people online, to in-depth essays on how death, government transparency, and courtship are all being re-defined in the age of connectivity.

"How we connect to each other is often defined by what we do online, but connecting is so much more than that," says my colleague Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind. "With this issue we wanted to explore how easy access to information and communication is affecting our analog lives, as well as our digital ones."

In addition to frog's designers, strategists, and technologists, special contributors to this issue include Allison Arieff, The New York Times columnist and former editor of dwell magazine, Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson, and noted journalists James Nestor, David A. Greene, Nate Berg, and Michele Travierso.

Highlights include:

Facebook's Design Strategy: A Status Update: frog consulting editor Reena Jana goes behind the scenes of Facebook, revealing the rarely seen creative culture behind the social network that is approaching one billion worldwide users - and sparks many a debate on privacy and aesthetic issues.

The Tech Evolution: frog executive creative director David Merkoski sits down with author and visionary Kevin Kelly to discuss Kelly's theory that all of technology is an organism, with needs and wants of its own.

Go Ahead, Remake My Product: Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson discusses why companies should embrace, rather than prosecute, hackers who illegally tweak their goods and services.

Single Nation: Shanghai-based writer Michele Travierso, contributor to The Economist, Monocle, and Wired, looks at how dating and marriage in China today is getting more complicated as the Chinese economy skyrockets and citizens pursue their love of commerce.

The Connected Company: Dave Gray, partner in the Dachis Group and founder of visual-thinking company XPLANE, views corporations as living ecosystems. Tech and the City: journalist Nate Berg explores how New York City's first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne - and her counterparts in other metropolitan governments - are using social and other digital media to boost transparency and accessibility.

Networks to Neighborhoods: frog content and community manager Kristina Loring analyzes how everyday people are enhancing their relationships and productivity both online and offline, thanks to today's digital tools from Quora to Skillshare.

The End: writer and TV producer David A. Greene investigates what happens with our online selves when we die physically, and how death itself is finding a new identity in the Internet age.

Death and Beauty: created by award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, this map plots 2009 murders in San Francisco and tells a story of a city's disconnected neighborhoods-those of privilege and safety, and those of poverty and violence, in an elegant graphic.

You can check out The Connective Issue online or order the print issue here.

Enjoy!

Social Media and Good Design (Telecom TV)

Interview with Futurist CMO: Insights Plus Imagination Is the Magic Formula

I am delighted to speak at the Futurist CMO Summit on August 25-26 in Gurgaon, India, organized by the tireless Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Wipro, who is now poised to foster the marketing ecosystem in India with her new venture Paul Writer. The Paul Writer team conducted a brief teaser interview with me for the conference site:

"1. What is design thinking according to you?

Design Thinking is a marketing buzzword which I prefer not to use, and we don’t really use at frog either. We pride ourselves on design thinking and doing, on innovation, which implies that we make ideas real rather than just coming up with blue-sky strategies. Today’s marketers need to be experts in what design thinkers may define as an open, creative process based around the ‘building-up’ of ideas. But the trend towards more participatory product development, consumer engagement, crowdsourcing, etc. goes far beyond just a trendy label – it marks a significant shift in consumer culture and in the way we do business. Good marketers know that and are by definition masters in holistic thinking. In this respect, marketing was design thinking long before Design Thinking was even thought of. Ultimately, it’s all about designing smart, meaningful interactions between brands and their constituents. If there is no creativity involved, and your marketing is all ‘science-y’ but there is no art in it, it will be hard to build your brand.

2. How is frog different from other design centric firms?

First of all, through our size and reach. With 15 locations and 1,600 employees, frog is one of the world’s largest design and innovation firms. And with our most recent expansion into India – with staff in Gurgaon, Bangalore, and Chennai – as well as our offices in Johannesburg and Shanghai, we are strengthening our footprint in emerging markets. But what really makes us different is our culture and expertise. We have more than 40 years’ experience in developing innovative products and services for blue-chip companies such as Apple, BMW, Disney, GE, HP, Intel, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, or Sony, and have driven fundamental change in industries including consumer electronics, computing, retail, financial services, entertainment, transportation, healthcare, and energy. Founded as an industrial design firm in 1969, we have continuously expanded our capabilities and now offer a unique combination of product design, interaction design, customer and market insights, brand, strategy, and software engineering. All these capabilities are seamlessly integrated into what we call our “integrated delivery model” that deploys an interdisciplinary, concurrent process to accelerate and improve end-to-end innovations for our clients. This convergence of strategy and craftsmanship, radical creativity and business savvy, hardware and software design, is unparalleled in the marketplace. No other firm offers the same depth and breadth of innovation services. Most importantly, frog has a distinct culture: people who work here – we call them “frogs” – are idealists driven by their passion and the ambition to improve the lives of consumers through better products and services. At the same time they’re pragmatic subject-matter experts who really “get” our clients’ business so that they can challenge it. They’re rebels with a cause.

3. Why is a human centered approach to the design process important in a company's growth?

Well, design is for humans so it appears to be a good idea to put them into the center of the process – all the way from the initial observational research to participatory design to the final product development. This doesn’t mean, however, that design should just react to user needs. Rather, it means spotting patterns in human behavior in order to understand the hidden desires of consumers that are not articulated yet but may drive the next big disruptive innovation. Insights plus imagination is the magic formula. ZipCar, Facebook, Netflix, the iPhone, the Wii, and other success stories are all examples of that. As we are inundated by a deluge of data and grapple with complex technologies, shorter innovation cycles, hyper-connectivity, and myriad channels of social computing that are reshaping the way we live, it is the responsibility not just of designers but anyone in business to humanize technology and create “connected” products and experiences that are intuitive, responsible, and meaningful. Ultimately, this is a question of empathy and social intelligence. Smart brands retain the ability to “feel” even if they may obsess over analytics. Companies like Apple, Google, or IBM which are at their very core passionate about improving the world and compassionate about their employees, customers, and the world at large are there to last. Companies who don’t “feel” are not.

4. Doesn't the idea of a good design change from culture to culture?

Do you have a favorite insight about India /Indian ? Absolutely, and one has to be careful not to mix the local differences into a global mainstream style that is in fact the lowest common denominator. There are certain basic ingredients though that I believe make products and experiences successful across various cultures: ease of use, uniqueness, built-in social features that enhance viral distribution, a strong story, cultural sensitivity and the ability to create a culture of their own. With regard to India, the “Jugaad” phenomenon – reverse or frugal innovation – is definitely very interesting and a tremendous opportunity, and I’m sure we will see more design-driven innovations coming out of India that set trends worldwide.

5. How does a marketer progress from a "Chief Marketing Officer" to "Chief Meaning Officer"?

I came up with the concept of “Chief Meaning Officer” to express the need and the historic opportunity for marketers to spearhead a broader transformation of business – away from an economic model that has cost us so dearly in the recent financial crash and will continue to do so, to a more values-driven model that is based on strong ethics and long-term thinking. I strongly believe a “meaning surplus” will become imperative: Only businesses that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty. For marketers, this means moving beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal of facilitating transactions. Marketing must now create meaning through actions and interactions – marketing without marketing. Their task is to negotiate a New Deal, a new social contract between brands, their stakeholders, and society at large. There are two reasons marketers are uniquely positioned for this mission: First, they are disposed to transformation by the very nature of their role. They must constantly adapt to ever-changing customer behaviors, and because of this exposure to trends they can act as true business innovators, challenging the status quo inside their organizations. Second, since marketers serve as the public interface of their companies, orchestrating the relationships between the key market actors (customer, media, and public), they can also fulfill that role within their organizations, facilitating among R&D, operations, sales, finance, and HR.

6. Which are some of your favorite blogs and twitter handles?

I love reading John Hagel’s thoughtful posts (the author of “The Power of Pull”). I also regularly read Paul Writer’s Marketing Booster, which provides a helpful snapshot of key industry trends.

7. This is your second time at the Futurist CMO. What are you looking forward to? / What keeps bringing you back?

For starters, the majority of my team and the majority of our workforce are based in India, and I try to come here as often as I can. Besides that, India is the perfect place for marketers who want to gain insights into the future. It is such a vibrant market environment right now, both in terms of scale and pace, and I find it inspiring to learn from India’s marketing thought leaders and practitioners. The first Futurist CMO conference last year was fantastic, and I had a lot of interesting conversations. Jessie and her team are wonderful hosts, and an event with such focus and quality is rare in the marketing field. I am really looking forward to it."

Airbus Envisions Air Travel in 2050

Can flying be fun again? Yes, it can. Airbus just released a video and a series of images that envision air travel in 2050 as a fully immersive, human-centered experience. The company’s designers and engineers conceptualized a plane with "bionic structure and interactive membrane” that provides spectacular panoramic views through its almost fully transparent skin.

The travel experience puts the passenger firmly back in control. Leg room issues in coach would be a thing of the past. Instead of dividing into classes, the aircraft of the future offers spaces based on user preferences. Passengers would be able to spend some of their time on board in a ‘smart tech’ section, a few hours in the ‘interaction’ section, or they could relax and enjoy the views in in the ‘vitalizing’ section upfront. Oh, and there will be automorphing seats, virtual golf, a lot of contextual info on touchscreens (of course), and many other neat interactive features.

Some of the ‘futuristic’ concepts are so intriguing that one wonders why they can’t be implemented sooner than 2050. Sure, innovation cycles in the aviation industry are notoriously long, but still: Why do planes by and large still look like in the 70’s and the in-flight experience is getting worse every year. Do we really have to wait 40 years before flying is fun again?

Anthony Weiner, the Demise of Guys, and the Comfort of Strangers

Is it perverse that your boss might know more about your life than your best friends? That you spend more time with your desk neighbor at work than with your spouse? That your colleagues experience you in more emotionally extreme situations than most of your friends, in moments of utmost success and failure, triumph and defeat?

Perhaps it is not. In times of uber-connectivity, constant stimulus, and near work/life congruence, it is no surprise that work relationships can often provide more emotional and intellectual kinship (true intimacy requires an actual “meeting of minds” rather than just bodily pleasures, as any psychologist would submit) than other social institutions (such as marriage, family, or church) which are deliberately designed to meet the human need for intimacy.

Ironically, with distances between objects shrinking, the distances between subjects seem to increase. It is a remarkable paradox of our radical age of transparency, where everyone virtually knows everyone, that intimacy is now mainly enabled by publicity, computed by social technologies, and personalized through digital “touchpoints” which are anything but personal. From US Representative Anthony Weiner’s “sexting” to Facebook friendships, and other forms of digital interactions with virtual companions, it seems as if we’re increasingly unable to find and nurture intimacy with people we know, and increasingly seeking for it in encounters with people we don’t know. The proverbial “comfort of strangers” has become the rare intimate moment disrupting the many mundane moments in our entangled webs of social connectedness.

And Anthony Weiner’s bizarre internet adventures may be symptomatic of a more pessimistic broader phenomenon. Philip Zimbardo, the scientist who carried out the infamous Stanford prison experiment in the early 1970s (read this interview with him in design mind), argues that intimacy has all but disappeared from modern life, at least male modern life. In his short TED talk this year, entitled "The Demise of Guys," he presented some astonishing statistics. Apparently, teenage boys now view an average of 50 porno clips per week. Zimbardo therefore concludes that gaming and porn digitally rewire boys’ brains for constant arousal, eventually leading to their failure as men, both sexually and socially, because they’re no longer able to establish and sustain intimate loving relationships with the opposite sex. He thinks that the proliferation of "guy bonding" movies, in which adult men are portrayed as adolescent, immature beings that are more interested in bonding activities with others than in more serious pursuits, is one of the indications of how widespread the phenomenon of immature male-hood has become.

Where does that leave the concept of intimacy? You could argue that it is best cherished in reclaimed analog spaces, in those “hiding in plain sight” settings that are small enough not to be “socialized,” serendipitous enough not to be “personalized,” and public enough not to intrude our sense of privacy. From the artificial closeness of ad-hoc individual encounters such as the casual chat with the barista in your coffee shop or the conversation at an exclusive conference, or in communal moments such as a flash mob – intimacy becomes possible through coincidental “meetings of the minds” that literally catch us off guard. Outside of our comfort zones the paths less traveled cross more often, and the comfort of strangers makes us intimately and acutely aware of whom we are.

2011 State of Marketing Study

Strategic marketing and branding consultancy Prophet has released its 2011 State of Marketing study, which finds that senior marketing executives are grappling with a variety of pressures as they seek to drive growth and build brand equity:

- The primary challenge is successfully driving growth through a brand positioning that is different from market alternatives and relevant to key customer needs.

- A majority of executives still believe, despite increasing evidence to the contrary, that the company (rather than the customer or other stakeholders) is the primary "owner" of the brand.

- Over the next three years, a quality offer (product/service) will continue to be the most important driver of brand equity, but word of mouth is expected to replace advertising in relative importance.

- Effectively targeting customers in this environment is problematic. Most tend to use similar positioning and messages for multiple customer segments - whether they are relevant or not.

- They believe their organizations are not well-equipped with the skills that are needed to build brands in the near future.

Prophet recommends marketing leaders and their teams become more aligned with the C-suite and board of directors by adopting a P&L and operational mindset. It proposes a perspective keyed to the business growth agenda, and being accountable for meeting it – in the short and long terms. And it emphasizes continued development and use of deeper customer insights, particularly as applied in a network-led environment.

The key principles are spot on:

- From creating marketing strategies to driving business Impact

- From controlling the message to galvanizing your Network

- From incremental improvements to pervasive innovation

- From managing marketing investments to inspiring marketing excellence

- From an operational focus to a relentless customer focus

Mobile Financial Services Still Lacking Scale and Scope

There are now more than 1 billion people around the world who have mobile phones but no bank accounts. It is is therefore not surprising that Mobile Financial Services have been hailed as an effective means for providing the unbanked population in emerging markets with access to essential financial services. Providers like M-Pesa in Kenya or M-Paisa in Afghanistan (researched on the ground by frog executive creative director Jan Chipchase) have gained traction and are considered to be potentially groundbreaking “reverse” innovations that could also inspire business models in developed markets where Mobile Financial Services are on the rise, too (nearly 30 million Americans accessed financial services accounts through their mobile phones in the fourth quarter of 2010, a 54% rise on the same period the previous year, according to comScore). But how widespread is the adoption of these services really among “the unbanked”?

According to the Mobile Financial Services Development Report 2011 recently released by the World Economic Forum (in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group), Mobile Financial Services in emerging markets are not as advanced as perhaps expected, both in terms of scale and scope. The report, a comprehensive analysis of over 100 variables across 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, concludes that mobile banking is currently confined to a few countries where access to financial services has been historically constrained. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the scope of services is mainly limited to mobile money transfer, with other features such as savings, credit, and micro-insurance still nascent.

Only a few countries covered by the report have achieved adoption levels of more than 10% of the total adult population, among them Kenya and the Philippines. The study shows that a common characteristic of these countries is a dense network of agents – retail access points that are capable of registering account holders and handling cash transactions. However, as these countries look to achieve scale in mobile financial services beyond payments, focusing on factors such as government disbursements through the mobile platform, the competitiveness of their financial and telecom sectors, and better data collection and monitoring to facilitate “test and learn” approaches will need to become a priority.

To enable more widespread adoption of Mobile Financial Services, the report suggests that policymakers should focus on the flexibility of regulatory provisions for non-bank players, the competitiveness of market structures, and the strengthening of financial literacy skills of individuals. "Including millions in the formal economy by providing them with tools to transact and save can have strong positive economic and social benefits," said Marc Vos, a partner in The Boston Consulting Group's Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice. "But public and private stakeholders must first get the basics right: solid and efficient distribution networks close to the consumer, and regulations that combine openness to innovation with protection of consumers and broader financial stability."

The report is optimistic that countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, or India may well be capable of achieving scale for Mobile Financial Services based on their existing infrastructure: “The ability to leverage existing agent networks and consumer protection in Brazil may facilitate the development of more complex financial services through the mobile platform. The widespread availability of mobile phones within India, the degree of competition within its telecom sector and recent regulatory changes may drive dramatic improvements in adoption levels.”